Tomorrow we will be again seeing flags raised across New Zealand, bands piping at 7 am and crowds gathering around every cenotaph in the country. This is a commemoration of war, but is war worth remembering? Well of course we are not remembering war, but who we have lost in it. We remember the stupidity of war, we remember that killing people we don't know is irrational when they have done nothing to us. Because they haven't personally, nor has their country. We remember all those who died for somebody else's war, the war of an empire our great-grandfathers may have never seen first hand.
This wasn't the war of our fathers nor our grandfathers, they are now our great-grandfathers, people so distant we can hardly imagine them. They didn't listen to the radio and half of New Zealand was still rural. All their information, all their sense of nationalism was very different to ours. They read newspapers that reported the information a week late and who were they but an amalgamation of Brits and Irish fighting for their livelihoods in a quite unknown climate? They still saw Maori as savages and some even hoped they would go extinct, like a beast...
So why do we remember those we do not know?
I guess I cannot really speak. I come from a nation, Catalonia, that celebrates the defeat to Spain and its empire on September 11th 1714. When the Spanish finished sieging my hometown Lleida in 1708, less than 2000 people were reported still alive. Hitherto Lleida had been an important agricultural centre, the most important city of a trade-route between Catalonia and Aragon and from there Spain, and was the seat of one of Europe's oldest universities, our contributions to the field of medecine are innumerable, in part because Jews and Muslims participated in scholarly life. Spain though destroyed the city and killed the wounded in the hospital of St Mary. All universities in Catalonia were torn down, in Lleida the Queen's castle, where she lived for 200 years was destroyed as well as all the other noble buildings. We went from 300 noble palaces to none, overnight. Saying that the city was destroyed is an understatement, it did not recover until the early 20th century. Spain prohibited the use of the Catalan language too and imposed military rule, further breaking up the territory, half of which had recently been given to France.
Yet we celebrate the loss. We are insistent and we survive, the language is blooming, 10th most important on the internet according to Google, culture re-rooting and we are looking at starting our own path once more. The two previous times we did led to the loss in 1714 and the loss in the civil war in 1939. Looking at 1714 shows the unity of the Catalan people and our tenacity, we never gave up. It is a source of pride.
New Zealand and Anzac could be something similar, in a sense it did unite the country in grief. 95 years since the first service and we still cry. New Zealand though wasn't fighting for itself, it was fighting for an empire that took lots from its colonies but seldom gave back. Moreover, Gallipoli is an example of racism:
My great-grandfather almost fought there. His regiment had been selected to train for it, in Tanganyika and in Gaza. Both of these were a failure, the army was left to jump off boats and sink- the navy did not want to get any closer. It was a failure in logistics repeated in Gallipoli and a success for the Turkish who in some areas were well outnumbered. My great-grandfather though was not allowed to fight because he was in the East Indian regiment. Churchill decided Gallipoli would be for the French and the British to recapture, Europe would be in safe hands once again as the oldest nations tied the continent back together. Because the Indians were not European, they were not allowed to attack, even though they had been preparing for it for the last year.
Anzac is a day of unity, almost every Kiwi has someone who fought in the Great War. New Zealand is a small country yet it committed itself more than anyone else. Gallipoli entitles the kiwi to a sense of pride much like Catalonia's, even though we may be small, we matter. We tread twice as hard to make ourselves heard. This sense of pride can be seen in every town and atop mountains and tomorrow New Zealanders will remember the dead there, but are we celebrating New Zealand or celebrating a bygone empire.
Why don't we celebrate the day New Zealand was discovered? Because it could be offensive to Maori. Why don't we celebrate the day Maori and Pakeha put down their arms after the Maori Wars? Because we slaughtered so many in order to take away their land.
New Zealand's problem is that it has to celebrate a day it truly united and it hasn't got one. Even in WWI many Maori iwi refused to participate. Maori did not see why they should be fighting for an empire that had abandoned them.
I bought a white poppy to show my stance on war: it kills. It doesn't mean I refuse to remember, it means I will not forget war's price. 2271 Kiwis died in Gallipoli, why are we still fighting then? Shouldn't Anzac day symbolise the day we put down arms and war remind us of what we should never do again?
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